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Why Jetpack Stats Could Be Giving You a Skewed Picture of Your Visitors

As with many other websites these days, the number of page views for this blog has plummeted. The lower the numbers are, the more important it would be for the statistics tool to report the correct numbers. Unfortunately, Jetpack Stats is not up to the task. After collecting data for the last 12 months, I concluded that Jetpack misses up to 30% of the page views.

Collecting data

From 1 November 2023 to the end of October 2024, I used two additional statistics tools to measure the page views and visitors on this blog. I adjusted the settings as much as possible to get similar results. Since it run on WordPress, I installed these two plug-ins to validate the measurements by Jetpack:

  • Statify from the Pluginkollektiv. It is a GDPR compliant plug-in that has a minimal widget for the dashboard that shows the top sites and the number of page views.
  • WP Statistics by VeronaLabs. It is also GDPR compliant but offers a significantly larger set of insights into the visitors of your site. You can see what browser and operating system your visitors use and from which countries they come.

The total number of page views

By collecting the data on a weekly basis, I got at the end these numbers for the 12 months:

Jetpack got 109'343 page views, WP Statistics 128'320 and Statify 156'036.

In comparison to Jetpack, Statify got 46'690 page views more while WP Statistics counted 18'974 more. This would mean that Jetpack missed between 15% and 30% of the page views.

The total number of visitors

Since Statify does not report the number of visitors, we cannot use it for this comparison. The difference between Jetpack and WP Statistics is in a similar range of an underreporting by 15% as it is by the page views:

Jetpack registered 109'346 visitors for the year, while WP Statistics got 128'832.

The numbers by month

If we take a closer look at the numbers for the page views and compare them month by month, we see a slightly different picture:

Statify reports every month the most page views, WP Statistics is only 3 months below the numbers of Jetpack.

Statify is every month the tool with the most reported page views. WP Statistics is usually closer to Statify than Jetpack, except for the months of July, August and September. In these 3 months WP Statistics had a problem and missed many page views.

The monthly visitors show us a different picture:

November to January Jetpack and WP Statistics are close, from February to May WP Statistics has a larger lead. For June, August and September Jetpack is in the lead. In October WP Statistics is massively ahead of Jetpack.

The difference between Jetpack and WP Statistics started small and grow from February onward up to June. In July, August and September Jetpack found more visitors than WP Statistics, but in October Jetpack was again way behind.

Conclusion

While Jetpack offers a helpful dashboard to see where your visitors come from and what posts they read, it may miss a lot of your traffic.

Even when Statify reported 30% more page views, I would not switch to this plugin. The reporting is too minimal to get anything useful out of it. And I do not see the point in writing my own dashboard on top of Statify to compensate for its shortcomings.

WP Statistics is a good middle ground to know what goes on and have a more realistic number of page views and visitors – roughly 15% more than what Jetpack finds. The dashboard is rather complex, but it offers you insights that Jetpack cannot give you.